Drive-By Truckers Decoration Day 180g 2LP (Clear With Gold Splatter Vinyl)

New West Records began releasing music in 1998 and one of the labels earliest successes came in the form of their partnership with the Drive-By Truckers and the music that this historic band would create. With over one million records sold across the New West - DBT catalog it is safe to say that there is a solid and ever growing fanbase for this culturally impactful band. New West is proud to celebrate over 15 years worth of music and releases by FINALLY releasing the Drive-By Trucker back catalogue on color vinyl.

Decoration Day is the day many southern churches set aside to place flowers on the graves of their departed loved ones. Drive-By Truckers used this as the title for their New West Records debut release.

Recorded at Chase Park Transduction Studios in Athens, Georgia, by David Barbe (Sugar, Son Volt, The Glands). The album was recorded mostly live in the studio over a two-week period. The fifteen songs reflect a two-year period of turmoil that the band had gone through surrounding the making of their critically acclaimed 2000 release Southern Rock Opera. Decoration Day more or less became an album about choices, good and bad, right and wrong, and the consequences of those choices.

The songs come from some dark times. The band had spent several years on the road, recording four albums between tours, and often leaving loved ones back home, to deal with all kinds of financial hardships alone. The same period also saw the passing of several loved ones (some by natural causes, and some not). Eventually the turmoil began to take its toll on the band itself.

Despite the dark nature of most of the songs, the album was a blast to record. New guitarist Jason Isbell joined the band about a year earlier and contributes two amazing songs, including the title cut. Everyone involved seems to have come out the other end of all the previous turmoil. David Barbe rolled the tape, capturing the band in its finest form ever. Seven of the songs were first takes (with about five second takes), yet for the first time, the band had the luxury of spending a little more time on the details.

The album boasts a handful of crowd-pleasing, party-starting cuts, like the brash, cranky rocker "Hell No, I Ain't Happy" and the Stones ringer "Marry Me". Yet more common are moments of startling beauty (the steel solos on "The Deeper In" and "Loaded Gun In The Closet" and the jangling guitars, rolling melodies and soulful fiddle breaks of "Heathens" and "My Sweet Annette") and heavy doses of recrimination and regret, as in the back-to-back suicide tunes "When The Pin Hits The Shell" and "Do It Yourself".